How Ukip and the Conservatives can both win the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election

Conservative and Ukip supporters need to work together (Graphic: Raheem Kassam)

Yesterday, Labour fired the starting gun for the Wynthenshawe and Sale East by-election. The party has opted for a snap election – the constituents will go to the polls on February 13th – which suggests Labour is worried about Ukip and wants to minimise the time it has to build up momentum. According to an article in the Guardian yesterday, Labour is planning to test some anti-Ukip leaflets in Wythenshawe. "Ukip are eroding our base in coastal towns and the north," says a senior Labour MP. "It is a judgement whether Labour welcomes Ukip taking Tory votes or worries about what is happening long term to our own vote." You can see a full profile of the constituency by the Spectator's Sebastian Payne here.

How well Ukip does on February 13th will hinge, in part, on how many Conservative voters the party can attract. A couple of weeks ago, I helped launch Country Before Party, the campaign to stop Ed Miliband getting to Number 10 and secure an EU referendum in the next Parliament. It's a grass roots effort by both Ukip and Conservative members to persuade supporters of both parties to vote for whichever candidate is best placed to win in a number of key marginals, whether Ukip or Conservative. Given that Ukip has come second in five by-elections since 2010 – Eastleigh, South Shields, Barnsley Central, Rotherham and Middlesbrough – we believe Wythenshawe is winnable by the party. To that end, we'll be urging Conservative supporters in the constituency to vote Ukip.

Of course, local Tories are unlikely to do this in large numbers unless they get something in return. For that reason, the Country Before Party campaign is also encouraging the Ukip association in the neighbouring constituency of Bury North to announce it won't be fielding a candidate against David Nuttall in 2015. Bury North is one of the 40 most marginal Conservative seats and, according to Lord Ashcroft's marginals poll, one of the seats the Tories will lose to Labour in 2015 unless those Conservative voters in the constituency who've defected to Ukip can be persuaded to return. The bottom line is that if Ukip fields a candidate in Bury North, the seat will fall to Labour in 2015 and if it doesn't the Conservatives will hang on.

There's precedent for this. At the last general election, local Ukip associations agreed not to oppose five Conservatives — three sitting MPs: Douglas Carswell (Clacton), Philip Davies (Shipley) and Philip Hollobone (Kettering); and two prospective parliamentary candidates: Janice Small (Batley and Spen) and Alex Story (Wakefield).

Ukip supported Conservative MP Mark Reckless in 2010

All five of those Conservative candidates were Eurosceptics – and you can't get much more Eurosceptic than David Nuttall. If you check his voting history on European issues on this Bruges Group site, he gets a positive rating of 80 per cent. So urging Kippers to support him in Bury North won't be such a big ask, particularly if its a quid pro quo for local Conservatives backing the Ukip candidate in Wythenshawe.

The best possible scenario would be if the Ukip and Conservative associations in both Wythenshaw and Bury North got together and thrashed out a deal. The incentive for doing so is clear enough: one Ukip and one Conservative MP instead of two Labour MPs. It would also set a great precedent, encouraging other Ukip and Conservative associations to cut similar deals. The 2015 general election promises to be a very tight race, with Labour and the Tories competing to win the largest number of seats in a hung Parliament rather than an outright majority. Deals such as this could have a decisive impact.

The main objection to any pact is that it would risk alienating supporters of both parties. Moderate Tories warn that lots of floating voters and Lib Dem refugees would be put off, and plenty of Kippers are equally sceptical, pointing out that the party attracts former Labour voters as well as Conservatives. But would those Tory and Ukip voters who don't see themselves as "on the Right" desert the parties for Labour or the Lib Dems if there was a Tory/Ukip alliance? I think the answer's yes if it was a national pact, endorsed by the leaders of both parties, but no if it was a patchwork quilt of constituency-level pacts between the parties' activists. I'm not urging the Ukip candidate in Wythenshawe and Sale East to stand as a "Ukip-Conservative" candidate or David Nuttall to stand as a "Conservative-Ukip" candidate, only for their respective opponents to stand down to avoid dividing the anti-Labour vote.

Realistically, a local deal along the lines I'm suggesting, involving a four-way negotiation between both Ukip and Conservative associations in Wythenshawe and Bury North, is a long shot. But that doesn't mean some of the parties' activists in both constituencies can't cut an informal deal among themselves. In this way, even if the Tories put someone up against Ukip in Wythenshawe, that person would be a "paper" candidate – and likewise the Ukip candidate in Bury North. Remember, not all the parties' supporters have to vote tactically in both constituencies for a vote swapping arrangement of this kind to work. Just enough of them.

There's another objection to what I'm proposing, this from the Conservative side, which is that it's not in the party's interests to see Ukip win a seat. The moment that happens, Ukip suddenly becomes much more credible and that, in turn, would mean more voters defecting from the Tories and fewer refugees returning to the Conservative fold as the general election approaches.

I think that's a risk, but don't forget that Wythnshawe and Sale East is considered a safe Labour seat so if it fell to Ukip that would cause more damage to Labour than the Tories. Ukip has already plucked the low-hanging fruit in Conservative seats in the South so the party would be unlikely to attract more Tory defectors in large numbers if it wins on February 13th. Labour voters, on the other hand, are Ukip's for the taking, particularly in Labour's Northern heartlands where the party has taken its voters for granted for decades. If Wythenshawe fell to Ukip, it could trigger mass defections, establishing Ukip as the main opposition to Labour in the North. In short, whatever headache a Ukip win would give the Tories, it would be nothing compared to the eye-watering migraine it would give Labour.

Another benefit to the Conservatives would be that Ukip would re-direct its resources from trying to win seats from the Tories in seaside towns on the East and South coasts – constituencies like Great Yarmouth and Portsmouth – to targeting Labour seats in the Midlands and the North. Jeremy Cliffe has an interesting piece in the current issue of the Economist about the "poujadistes in bungalows” Ukip is trying to mobilise in depressed, seaside towns. "This realm of faded tea rooms, big skies, beach huts and Polish supermarkets has become Ukip’s political heartland," he wrote. That's a problem for the Conservatives because those areas have, in the main, returned Conservative members of Parliament up to now. Anything the Tories can do to encourage Ukip to re-focus its efforts in Labour strongholds elsewhere would be helpful – and a Ukip win in Wythenshawe would do that.

I'm a member of the Conservative Party and I consider myself a loyal member, not a renegade. Last week, I held a fundraiser at my house in Acton for the local Conservative candidates in my ward in the forthcoming local elections. But it's precisely because I'm a Tory loyalist that I'm supporting the Country Before Party campaign. If the choice is between two non-Labour MPs – a Kipper in Wythenshawe and a Tory in Bury North – and two Labour MPs, it's in the Conservative Party's interest to plump for the former. Yes, it will be to Ukip's advantage as well, but in this case our interests are aligned. If supporters of both parties can put their difference aside and vote for the candidates best placed to defeat Labour in Wythenshawe and Bury North, there's a big prize to be won. If they can't, Ed Miliband will be the winner on February 13th and in all likelihood in 2015 as well.

If you're interested in getting involved in the Country Before Party campaign, email me at CountryB4Party@gmail.com. You can find the Country Before Party's Facebook page here.